placement

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Look Around to Get Strength and Perspective.

My sister and her baby.

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Self-Care Tip #145 – Look around to get strength.

I was talking with my colleague, Janice, who works intimately in the area of group homes and advocating for the clients.  I asked her to tell me something about them.

There are times when parents give up and they can’t provide.

I wrote a blog-post some time ago relating to this as I work with many families who are near this point or past it.  Taking care of ourselves can be hard enough in this world, let alone a disabled child or two, or three…  I’ve seen marvelous results from placements.   However, my blog-post, “Get in Someone’s Space” got a response that was not so complimentary.  I asked Janice about where she thought the comment was coming from.

There are a lot of good group homes but many are not.  The workers are paid minimum wage often and they are saints.  There are about 1/2 and 1/2 that are good v. not good.  They can make a lot of money potentially.  In some of the homes, the workers are ambivalent at best.  It is a job to them.  If they do care but are surrounded by people who don’t care they lose steam.  They can’t do it all.  Emergency homes are also useful to give parents a relief.

Some of the disabled in placement have no family involved.  Others do.  And in those that do have involved family give their family some time to recharge while in placement.  The family can recharge and use that new energy for things like continue to “shop” further for the best fit for placement.  It can be work to find the right placement and get someone moved there.  Then after that challenge is met, families will find other struggles.  Struggles such as placement being so far that the family can’t visit or be as involved as they’d like.  They find, as we all do at some ah-ha moment(s) in life, that we can’t have it all.

Mr. Rick stated it well.

I will not be a victim while choosing my burdens.

We could also say, “I will not be a victim while choosing my benefits,” perhaps.

I understand that the topic of disabled family and/or group home placements may not interest all of us.  It may not appear at the surface to be an issue involving eternal truths.  Yet, we see that it does.  We are, each of us, not so far removed from unfair life circumstances.  From choices that look “bad and also bad.”  Or could we say, rather, that look to be choices between “one benefit and another,” knowing that we can’t have it all?

No.  We are not so far away from the single mother raising her two mentally retarded children.  We are not that distant from the caregiver with license to house five children but can’t find good staffing.  We can see the fetal-alcohol syndrome child who got what he got from birth and will live where they are until they die with staff as their family.

To my parents who can’t give any more, choose your benefits.  They are there.  To my kids who are confused by their own behaviors and emotions, to my staffers who struggle to understand the value of their jobs, to you who feel more of the burdens than the benefits, to all of us, we are the same in this.  We are each other’s “people.”  We have this knowing.

Look around.  Gather strength and make your choices.

Question:  What has enabled your perspective?  What part came without effort and what part didn’t?  Please tell me your story.

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Get in Someone’s Space

The woman writes, but only for herself, she says.  “Why?”  I can’t remember her answer.  My thoughts stayed on the question, wondering why we don’t connect with our community.

Dropping off my children at school this morning, I noticed the pubescent girl with blunted face, guarded eyes, crossed arms, standing alone even surrounded by other kids.  Ouch!  I wanted to hover over her.  Guard her from what ever it is that’s scaring her.  Touch her arms and hair and make her understand that she is important to the universe on a small-scale and large-scale.  Of course I might have been arrested if I did, so I just walked on to safety.

Jeff Wise, author of Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger, writes

A feeling of connection to others is nature’s Xanax.

Some of my families with disabled children struggle hard to take care of their own.  They often wait until at cliffs edge emotionally, financially, physically to consider placement for their disabled child.  When helping them get past their barriers to placement, we find guilt, fear and shame in the way.  These children often do better physically and emotionally when they are in group homes and away from the emotional burdens in their nuclear family homes.  We need community and community needs us.  Each of us.  Joana Johnson, neuroscientist, says that placement, is in fact a way families can connect with their community and with their child.

Some skeptic personalities struggle to trust the links between us, not out of paranoia, but rather because it is the hard-wiring in their nature

to question things. There is also the introvert, who is often alone not because they don’t like people, but because that is how they get energy.  However, regardless of genetic predispositions, we are all designed to have community.

Mary Shelley tells us through her Frankenstein, that we are better people in the company of others.  We see forces that keep us from sharing ourselves.  But let us not believe those forces.  Break past.  Let us believe our own better Creator who tells us, connect.  Tell our stories.  Stick a finger out and get in someone’s space.  Do what we must to let them into ours.

Self Care Tip #42 – Share yourself and get community.  Be a friend to yourself.